


Bari

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Mustard Gas, Period-Typical Racism, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 10:02:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5159615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On December 2, 1943, the German air force released mustard gas on Allied forces in Bari, Italy.  (On December 1, Howard Stark's new plane limped into the same port, carrying a few crazies destined to go down in history as Captain America and his Commandos.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bari

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr, [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/101026627733/prompt-on-december-2-1943-the-german-airforce), for falcon-fox-and-coyote's brilliant prompt. Set right before the Commandos start raiding, but after the rescue and their training time in England.

Stark had promised the plane would get them from London to Bulgaria. He had crossed his heart and spat, and revealed the sleek aircraft with an exaggerated bow. So no one but Howard was surprised when the engines cut out over the Mediterranean, and they’d limped into Bari leaking fuel and sparking like Dugan’s Zippo lighter.

It would take a few days for repairs, Stark admitted, scowling at them from underneath the plane, covered in grease. Which left Steve and his new team at loose ends in the Italian port.

“Go on,” Bucky drawled, smoking Steve’s ration of cigarettes, smoke curling out of his mouth, white in the damp chill of the port in December. “Go see the art. There must be some, here.”

Steve rubbed the raised letters of his dog tags, thumb sliding over the JAMES BARNES hammered into the metal, the name warmed by his overheated skin. “I -” he stuttered, trying not to say that he didn’t want to let Bucky out of his sight. That he’d fallen asleep every night for months with one hand wrapped around his tags, reassured not at all by the fact that thousands of miles away, Bucky had Steve’s name carved into metal and resting on his chest. Steve’s name wouldn’t have done any good if Bucky had died on Zola’s table, thrown into the incinerator with his tags strung uselessly around a cold neck.

“I’d like to see the cathedral,” Gabe chimed in, unaware of the conversation he’d interrupted between Steve’s worried gaze and Bucky’s cool, ice-blue eyes. “If it’s still standing, that is.”

Jacques rolled his eyes and tugged at his mustache, muttering something in French that made Gabe laugh and Bucky snort. “Dernier says he’d be more interested in the circumference of the bomb damage,” Jones translated for the rest of them. “He’d like to see the munitions plant they have set up here, possibly acquire a few supplies.”

Steve had a distinct feeling – helped along by Bucky’s raised eyebrow and the memory of pelting down the street with a pie that had been cooling in Mrs. O’Brien’s window – that ‘acquire’ stood in for ‘pocket while whistling cheerfully,’ but he didn’t argue. He would let the team steal any tool they believed could bring Hydra down.

“You Neanderthals lack imagination,” Dum Dum complained, spinning his bowler on one finger while shaking his head. “We’re on leave in Italia! You know what that means!”

“Yeah?” Bucky exhaled, blowing a smoke ring toward Steve’s cheek. “What does that mean?”

“Women!”

“Gelato!”

Morita and Dugan spun to face each other, incredulous. “It’s _December_ , you Limey bastard,” Jim exclaimed, already wearing more clothing than the rest of them, and two knit caps. “Why on earth would you want ice cream when you could have a nice warm dame?”

“Have you _seen_ a woman eat gelato, or did you miss it with your squint?” Morita elbowed Dum Dum, but laughed, a far cry from the street fights that Steve recalled, shouts of “Kike!” and “Mick!” and “Kraut!” echoing down the block. “Besides, why settle for just one good thing?” Dugan added, and Jim raised his eyebrows, considering.

“As appealing as your grand tour sounds, Captain,” Monty threw in, patting Steve on the back. “I believe it’s a bit cold here, for my blood. Jim’s suggestion has a bit more _warmth_ to it.” He slung an arm around Dernier’s skinny shoulders, winked at Dum Dum, and gave a little wave. “C’mon, Jackie,” he declared, steering the Frenchman away from their group and gesturing Dugan and Morita to follow. “We’ll drop you off on our way. To each man his own bombshell, I suppose.”

“Come with us?” Steve asked Bucky, because Captain America didn’t beg, even when he knew before Bucky shook his head that the answer would be no. Bucky seemed all too eager to get away from him, since the factory, and Steve wished someone would tell him what he had done wrong.

“Not my area,” Bucky said, taking a step back and directing his gaze to the smoldering tip of his cigarette. “I can understand a Dago at the dock here as well as in Brooklyn, and Stark said they need extra hands. Said they’ll probably leave the lights on, work until the holds are empty. Don’t wait up,” he finished, and jogged away before Steve could respond.

“Wow,” Gabe said, breath visible in the icy breeze off the Adriatic Sea as they both watched Bucky’s drab green uniform grow smaller as his shined, black boots carried him away. “Sarge really doesn’t like art, does he?”

 _Sarge really doesn’t like something_ , Steve agreed, dragging his thumbnail over the ridged letters of Bucky’s name. _But I’m afraid it’s me_.

——

They’d lit up the flood lights over the docks, Howard told Steve, after Gabe had stopped trying to distract his Captain with cathedrals and artwork and let Steve drag them back to the barracks. There were over twenty ships docked, and more waiting in the harbor, weighted with supplies for the Allies. Howard went a little shifty when he said ‘supplies’, but Steve didn’t find out why until after dinner.

Bucky hadn’t come by, Stark said, but he didn’t look worried. No one but Steve seemed concerned with Bucky’s absence, though Monty, Dum Dum and Jim all appeared too dazed and lipstick smeared to be bothered by anything at all, even the slop the cafeteria called dinner.

The sirens started at 1930, bleating through the barrack walls and interrupting the poker game Steve had half-heartedly joined, watching Howard and Dum Dum face off over a pile of flattened cigarettes and gum.

Dernier burst into the room seconds later, red-faced and panting and already babbling in French, too fast for even Gabe to catch. Steve had already slung his uniform shirt back on, was reaching for his helmet before he caught one very important word. _Les quais_. The docks.

“What?” He grabbed Jacques’ shoulders, kicked over two of their cots in his haste to get there. “What about the docks? What’s going on?”

Dernier winced a little, at Steve’s grip, but Steve didn’t notice until Gabe wedged himself between them and pushed their Captain back. Jacques started again, slower, his face white. Gabe’s face tensed as he translated, lines deepening in his forehead and around his mouth. “Jackie says the Germans are bombing the port,” he said, swallowing to even out his voice. “Radio reports say they hit fuel, somewhere, and the whole harbor is on fire.”

Steve was halfway out the door before Howard tackled him. It didn’t knock him over, but it at least brought Stark close enough that his shouting penetrated the ringing in Steve’s ears. “Rogers, stop! You can’t go out there!”

His jaw was set even before he swung around, and Howard lifted both hands in surrender. Steve hadn’t realized he’d curled his hands into fists, but there they were. Bucky had always joked that Steve would sock the world in the face, one day. _Bucky_. Steve hadn’t leaped out of a plane into occupied territory just to lose Bucky in an Allied port.

“Rogers, listen! I didn’t stop you running off half-cocked the first time, did I? Just gave you a lift and a ‘chute.” That was true. Steve unclenched his fists, straining to hear Stark over the screech of the sirens and the pounding of his own heart. “There’s a ship in the harbor, the _Harvey_. Sent over from the good ol’ U.S. of A, special delivery. It’s -” Howard tugged at his mustache, cleared his throat. “- got a different sort of cargo. If they hit it, it’s best for all of us to stay out of the way.”

“ _What_ sort of cargo?” someone growled, advancing on Stark. Steve jumped when he realized that it wasn’t him, in time to watch Monty haul Howard up by his collar. “What’s the Army done to Sarge this time?”

“The Army’s not trying to kill Barnes!” Howard gasped, failing to pry Falsworth’s hands off him. “It’s not like they packed the mustard gas just for him!”

Steve couldn’t feel his fingertips, all of a sudden. “Mustard gas?” he heard himself echo, and his voice sounded very far away, his lips tingling the way they always did before they went numb.

 _Oh, honey, your Da would have come home if he could, you know that. It’s the way war works, baby boy. Men were never meant to breathe gas and live_.

“It’s like oil,” Mr. Barnes had told them, once, doleful and teary-eyed after too many glasses lifted to St. Paddy in one day. “Blisters your skin, burns wherever it touches. Makes men’s lungs bleed, when it skins ‘em from the inside.”

“I’m going,” Steve declared, startled to find Dernier and not Howard blocking his way. “You can’t stop me,” he said, as politely as he could manage while his pulse raced and he remembered Bucky laying on a metal table, blood drying at the corners of his mouth, in the chapped crevices of his lips. _Skinned from the inside_.

“No one’s stopping you, Cap,” Jim snapped, voice muffled by what appeared to be a layer of black rubber. “But you might want to throw on your costume, find some gloves. Give the rest of us time to – fuck, Dum Dum, that’s my _skin_ in that zipper! – get into these goddamn diving suits.”

Howard nodded his agreement, already heading for the door. “They’re right, Rogers. It’s the only chance you idiots stand of making it all the way to the docks, if they have hit the _John Harvey_. I’ll head to medical, see what I can get set up for your friend.”

Monty threw Steve’s cowl at his head, and he was still hopping into his boots and gauntlets as they tumbled out the door and into the smoky night.

———

Medical personnel were already on site by the time the Commandos roared onto the docks in a borrowed Jeep, loading the wounded onto stretchers and into ambulances, laying the dead off to one side. They wore gas masks, but it appeared to be for protection from the smoke caused by the explosions, the stench of the burning harbor, and not for the oily, yellow substance Steve could see cresting over the waves, rising in clouds of ugly smoke when another ship burst into flame.

There were servicemen everywhere, singed and soot-covered, indistinguishable in the haze from the explosions, the fog of gas and toxic smoke. He didn’t even know if Bucky had left his uniform on, or stripped to his undershirt like he often did working the docks at home.

“Bucky!” he shouted, muffled by his mask. “Bucky,” the name pounding through the frantic beating of his heart, the rhythm of his boots along the wooden piers.

The dark-haired GI at the end of the pier looked exactly the same as hundreds of other men coughing their lungs out around him, but Steve had seen Bucky on his hands and knees, trying to catch his breath after a punch to the gut. Had seen Bucky vomiting in an alley, after too much to drink, or retching in an Italian forest when he thought no one was awake to hear.

“Steve?” Bucky rasped, when Steve skidded to a stop, lifting a hand to pat at where Steve’s face should have been, hitting the harsh lines of the gas mask instead. “Steve?”

“I’ve got you,” Steve promised, grateful for the serum like he’d never been on tour, when it allowed him to haul Bucky into his arms, press his friend to the hollow ache in Steve’s chest and use Bucky’s weight to dig the edges of Steve’s dog tags into his skin. _James Barnes,_ the imprint would read, the name of Steve’s next of kin tattooed over his heart.

—-

“We’re not leaving,” Steve growled, when the base nurse looked askance at a team of five men dressed in black rubber suits and their leader who appeared to be wearing the American flag.

“At least change clothes,” Stark interceded from his position next to Bucky’s forehead, soaking a cloth and squeezing it out over the red, inflamed skin around Bucky’s eyes. “You’re all probably coated with gas.”

Steve couldn’t argue with that. He could, however, strip down to his skivvies without leaving Bucky’s side, and so he did, shivering a little in the winter air. Howard rolled his eyes when the Commandos all did the same thing, and suggested in Italian that the scandalized nurse might like to offer the crazy men some trousers.

“Steve?” Bucky whispered, wincing like Steve’s name was littered with thorns, wrapped in barbed wire and scraped out of his lungs. His bleeding, fragile lungs. He turned his face toward the sound of Steve’s voice, and Steve flinched. The skin around Bucky’s eyes and nose had begun to blister over the burns, yellow fluid trapped and hateful where Steve was used to seeing the dimple of Bucky’s smile.

“I’m right here,” he promised, climbing onto the cot without waiting for the nurse to bring him pants or a woolen sweater, clasping one of Bucky’s hands between his. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He’d never been more grateful that Bucky had grown up beside him, listening to all the stories Steve could find about mustard gas and the Great War. That his friend had recognized the hideous, oily film and thrown on gloves, pulled his undershirt up over his mouth to reduce exposure. Bucky’s hands were safe, and the doctors with their stethoscopes said his lungs would recover. But Bucky couldn’t pull men out of the burning water with his eyes closed, couldn’t save soldiers if he couldn’t see.

And so the skin above Bucky’s cheekbones was littered with blisters, and no matter how much fluid Howard sluiced over his eyes they stayed closed, red and swollen shut, his dark eyelashes nothing more than Steve’s memory.

“I can’t _see_ ,” Bucky hissed, and he might have sounded calm if it wasn’t for the deathly tight grip he had on Steve’s hand, the way he rolled his head back and forth on the pillow, trying to escape Howard and his dripping cloths. “Steve, I can’t see!” His voice rose in alarm, sharp enough to send him into a coughing fit that brought up blood.

Steve thought of the father he had only seen in pictures. His mother, pale and dying in the ward, blood on her pillow when she woke. Skinned from the inside. Bucky was the only family Steve had left.

“It’s just temporary,” Howard barked, clearly hoping that Bucky would stop wiggling away from Stark’s cure. “Stop moving, Barnes!”

Stark’s reassurance seemed to have the opposite effect, however. At the sound of someone else’s voice Bucky had frozen, then immediately tried to launch out of the cot and take Steve with him. “Stevie, run!” Bucky snarled, shoving at Steve’s hip. “Run!”

“It’s okay, Bucky,” Steve tried to soothe his friend, turning his bewildered gaze on the rest of the room. “It’s just Stark. You know, the flying car guy?”

Stark looked just as confused as Steve. The Commandos, on the other hand, didn’t look surprised at all.

“What’s going on?” Steve demanded, keeping his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, feeling his friend coiled tighter than a spring, shaking with something that Steve didn’t want to call fear. “What is it?”

“What do you think it is, Cap?” Jim spat, kicking angrily at Falsworth’s boot. “He’s blind and trapped.”

“Steve!” Bucky said again, the word groaned in pain. “I can’t protect you if I can’t see, punk. You have to run.” Apparently Morita’s voice didn’t register through Bucky’s blindness and the agony of his burns, because Bucky only tensed as if they were threatened on all sides.

“We’ll clear the tent,” Gabe murmured gently, steering a nurse away from them. “Stand guard outside. We’ll come back in when he can open his eyes.”

“Will we be doing this in our shorts?” Monty wondered, scooping up a pistol off a nearby cot. “Or should we strip completely bare?”

Howard sighed, but didn’t protest when Morita marched up and started pushing him out the door. “Flush his eyes for at least ten more minutes,” he commanded over Jim’s shoulder, walking backwards. “And get Vaseline on his eyelids, or they’ll stick together!”

Then he and Morita were gone, and Steve was alone with Bucky, like he hadn’t been since Brooklyn, discounting a few moments in Schmidt’s factory and a brief second in a London pub. Enough time for it to tear at Steve every time Bucky withdrew, to send Steve’s hand to his dog tags, clutching at Bucky’s name while he watched his best friend move farther away with every breath.

“Steve!” Bucky croaked, still hunched forward and shaking.

“Shh,” Steve responded, surrendering to the urge to drag Bucky back against his chest, gentle near the burns on his face. “It’s okay, Bucky, I promise. It’s just us. Can I rinse your eyes out? You’ll see faster, if you let me flush out the gas.” It felt like the world turned upside down, to be sitting on Bucky’s sick bed, worrying over his friend’s flushed skin and chattering teeth, stranger than it had felt to be the one rescuing Bucky from trouble, for once.

“I can’t see,” Bucky moaned, like a faulty phonograph record, the needle trapped in the wrong groove. “It’s useless, Stevie. ‘m useless.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Steve retorted, mouth roaring ahead of his brain. “You’ve never been useless, Buck. The staff sergeant at the docks thinks you saved twenty men from drowning, or catching fire.”

“I’m _blind_.” Bucky’s spittle was flecked with blood, the word and his breath wrenched from his suddenly fragile chest. “What good am I blind, Stevie, huh?”

Bucky’s anger slammed through Steve, rattling his bones like the time Moose Donovan had slammed him into a brick wall. “What good are you blind?” he repeated, his hand trembling as he wrung water into Bucky’s swollen eyes, his voice tight with fury. “ _What good are you?_ ”

Bucky tried to turn away, but Steve wouldn’t let him, pressing his free hand to the rough stubble along Bucky’s jaw to keep his head in place. “I’m supposed to protect you,” he muttered, the words bleeding into the antiseptic air around them. “It’s why you keep me around.” The set of Bucky’s jaw was familiar, even under raw and blistering skin: it was how he’d stared through the hospital wall, every time the doctors stood over Steve’s bed and said that there was nothing else they could do. It was the determination to bear whatever Steve couldn’t change.

Steve made a high, helpless noise in the back of his throat, and crushed the wet cloth in his fist. “You -” he said, “you stupid fucking moron. You idiot. How could you possibly think – Why would you – I keep you around because _I love you_ , you jackass, and obviously you’ve been blind for a whole goddamn decade if you never noticed that!” Steve paused to inhale and continue ranting, then reviewed the words that had just spilled out of his mouth and gasped at his own stupidity. “Shit, Bucky, I -”

“What?” Bucky breathed, stretching his fingers up to brush over Steve’s panicked expression when no more words were forthcoming. “Stevie, you what?”

“Is that why you don’t like me anymore?” Steve asked, instead of repeating himself. “Because I’m not worth protecting?” He reached for the tub of Vaseline, setting down the rag and leaning in to brush Vaseline gently over Bucky’s eyes.

Bucky snorted, which turned into a hacking cough that dotted blood over the white hospital sheets. “You don’t _need_ protecting, anymore,” he corrected scratchily, tilting his head back to allow Steve better access to his blind eyes. “And I can’t – Stevie, I couldn’t protect them. I couldn’t save any of ‘em.”

He clamped his mouth shut again, but didn’t flinch when Steve cupped his chin and rubbed Vaseline over his cracked lips, rubbing away the blood. For the first time, he wondered if it hadn’t been mustard gas, that killed his Da. If it wasn’t something else entirely – Mr. Barnes’ faraway gaze, the glass he threw at Bucky’s head when the boys tried to talk about the war – that skinned men from the inside.

“You save me,” Steve pointed out, swapping the Vaseline for the jelly the nurse had left for Bucky’s burns. “And you’re the only sharpshooter we’ve got, on the team.” It was no use telling Bucky that he couldn’t have saved the other men. Bucky had never pretended to understand how it felt to wake up in Steve’s shoes, aching and deaf, jaw clenched just to get through the day. Steve wouldn’t insult his best friend by pretending to comprehend his grief.

“Can’t shoot if I can’t see,” Bucky grumbled, but allowed Steve to prop him up and press a glass of water to his lips.

“Then I’ll tie you to my belt and keep you around so I know where all the stupid is,” Steve shot back, shifting behind Bucky so that Bucky could lay on something more comfortable than the folding cot, and Steve wouldn’t have to move off the bed. “But it’s not gonna last, Buck, so don’t worry about it. Everything will be different when you wake up in a few hours.”

“And the part where you love me?” Bucky pressed, resting tentatively against Steve’s chest, his head against the dog tags where Steve kept his name.

Steve laughed, trying to swallow it down so that he didn’t jar Bucky’s head. “Don’t think that’s going anywhere, jerk,” he snickered, bemused by the idea that Bucky even thought it could, as though loving Bucky wasn’t printed into Steve’s soul, hammered into the metal of his heart.

“Bet it could use some Vaseline, though,” Bucky retorted, and then had the gall to start snoring before Steve could stop gaping at the top of his head.

“Finally!” Jim whispered loudly, sticking his head through the doorway. Dernier’s head appeared a second later, below Morita’s, and Dugan stuck his face above them both. “We thought you dumbasses were hopeless.”

“Is he all right?” Dum Dum wondered, his voice low, bowler pushed back so he could see.

“He’s fine,” Steve reassured them, grinning perhaps a little wider than he should have, when the blisters were still settling, yellow and deadly, over Bucky’s face. And yet, Steve felt lighter than he had since Brooklyn, holding Bucky to his chest, where he belonged. “Everything’s fine,” Steve said – and when Bucky woke up blinking, bleary-eyed but able to see Steve’s face for that first, gentle kiss – well, then everything was.


End file.
